Study Of Disyllabic Modal Particles Of Yuan Qu

As an important branch of the Chinese grammatical system,the modal particles have experienced great changes from the ancient Chinese to the modern Chinese.In this historical developing process,the modern Chinese modal particles have played a vital role,severing as a link between past and future.Chinese in the Yuan Dynasty impacted greatly on the modern Chinese in this period and the former has distinct characteristics in the latter owning to the Mongolian invasion of the southern Song Dynasty.The modal particles are relatively stable,however,they are developing at the same time.For instance,there are few changes in the development of the modal particles before the modern Chinese appearing.Although the collocation of these words are common,the number of disyllabic modal particles is really small.However,the number of those words has increased a lot during the period of the modern Chinese,especially after the Song Dynasty and the Yuan Dynasty.Therefore,it is worthy of attention and research.Yuan Qu is the main literary form in the Yuan Dynasty with very colloquial and it is also the important linguistic data for the study of the modern Chinese.This paper takes Yuan Qu Xuan,Yuan Qu Xuan Wai Bian and some Southern Drama as the source of research,takes the eight disyllabic modal particles such as bale(??),eryi(??),bianshi(??),bianle(??),yehao(??),yeba(??),bucheng(??),zheli(??)as the study objects and collects the statistic of the example sentences in Yuan Qu.The modal meaning of those words are discussed form the pragmatic perspective,besides this,this paper also attempts to analyze the origin and formation of those disyllabic words and summarize the reasons of the formation by using the diachronic methods.In terms of the three groups of the modal particles:bale(??)and eryi(??),bianshi(??)and bianle(??),yehao(??)and yeba(??)which have the similar modal meaning,this paper discusses the syntax,the modal meaning and the modal tendency,hoping to provide some help to distinguish and understand those similar words.In addition,Zaju was mainly popular in northern region,while Southern Drama was mainly popular in southern region,which reflected the language conditions of different region at that time.Through simple statistics and comparison,we found that apart from the frequent use of bianle(??)in Zaju and Southern Drama,the over seven disyllabic modal particles were rarely used or even not used in Southern Drama.Therefore,the disyllabic modal particles should be a feature of the northern Chinese modal particle at that time.